Costa Rica wildlife

Gavin Bell is on a high in a country that prefers wildlife to warfare and, for the present, ecotourism to mega-resorts

12:00AM BST 21 Aug 1999

Cloud cuckoo land is more or less how I imagined it. It lies 10 degrees north of the equator, high among rumpled old volcanoes that have run out of steam and pastures that slope so steeply you wonder how the cows stay upright.

On the move: Thousands of Olive Ridley sea turtles arrive at Ostional beach, Costa Rica, to lay their eggs

From a distance it straddles the mountainous backbone of Costa Rica like a shaggy green carpet. On closer inspection it is a botanical dream world in which trees that seem to support the sky drift through tendrils of clouds, trailing vines and creepers like the wrecked rigging of ghost ships.

Among other notable features, the Monteverde Cloud Forest is arguably the most peaceful place on Earth. This stems from a community of Quaker farmers who arrived in the area from Alabama in 1950, after refusing to register for military service in the United States. They were looking for somewhere they could raise dairy cattle, grow vegetables and live in harmony with nature and their neighbours without being called upon to shoot anybody. They chose Costa Rica largely because it had taken the surprising but enlightened decision to abolish its armed forces, following a brief civil war. To this day the little country of about four million people has no army, no navy and no air force.

Costa Rica thus has its head in the clouds and its feet firmly planted in rich volcanic soil and a stable democracy that has spared it the violent upheavals of its unruly neighbours in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The philosophy of its good-natured people is expressed in a popular saying, pura vida, meaning literally "pure life".

I had long wanted to visit Costa Rica. Travellers in various parts of the world had extolled its virtues - a land of great natural beauty with the Caribbean on one side, the Pacific on the other and a lot of wild mountains and rainforests and friendly people in between.

This is not immediately apparent in San José, the grubby little capital that squats in a highland valley. The Teatro Nacional, built in the 1890s, is virtually the only structure of any elegance that has escaped the ravages of earthquakes and developers. But the terrace of the Grande Hotel opposite the theatre is a

splendid place to savour dark roasted coffee and observe the cavalcade of life streaming out of offices in the late afternoon.

The flavour of Graham Greene's Havana was sharpened by the appearance of three swarthy men in well-cut suits, strolling out of the adjacent casino. They were sleek, powerful men, one with long dark hair tied in a pony tail, who commanded instant deference from security gorillas in tuxedos. My friend and I surmised they were Colombian drug smugglers, or gun-runners from Nicaragua.

Equally they could have been football stars. Soccer is the enduring passion in a country where most fans can recite the Costa Rican team that beat Scotland in the 1990 World Cup Finals.

One of the few places in the country that does not have a football ground is an area the locals call the end of the world. It lies beneath a dormant volcano, the Indian name of which means mountain of tremors and thunder, but few people have seen it because it is enclosed by cliffs 1,500ft high and almost perpetually obscured by clouds. From the rim of the crater, occasional gaps in the clouds reveal glimpses of knife-edge ridges swathed in jungle, falling into nothingness. Our guide Alejandro assured us that anybody who went there was crazy. This was barely 10 miles from downtown San JosÆ.

The gods did not design the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica for mass tourism. It is hot and humid, and characterised by mangroves, swamps and rain. The local joke is that it rains 13 months a year. Because of the nature of the land, or rather the lack of it, there are no roads in or out of the Tortuguero National Park which encompasses a coastal swamp forest interlaced with rivers and canals. This is good news for a colony of green sea turtles that breeds there, as well as a menagerie of monkeys and sloths and anteaters and iguanas and crocodiles and frigate birds and kingfishers. This in turn is good news for adventurous tourists who arrive by shallow-draught boat, and get to see the wildlife at close quarters on canoe trips through the sort of jungle favoured by Indiana Jones.

Even the rain is exotic. Far from the monotonous drizzle of northern climes, it tends to descend in a steady downpour, drumming on tin roofs and cascading from leaves the size of golf umbrellas.

It is useful in such places to have a guide who knows where to find tiny, scarlet poison-arrow frogs, and to explain the life and death dramas enacted on Heliconia atisphata. This is a plant with strings of red beak-shaped fruits that attracts humming birds which feed on its nectar, and in the process transfer pollen dusted on their foreheads. Unfortunately this little-known fact is common knowledge among eyelash vipers, who lie in wait for humming bird suppers.

While walking in the forest, a barely perceptible movement on the path ahead of us alerted us to the presence of the next predator up the food chain. It was black and cream, about 12ft long, and it clearly resented our intrusion. Alejandro only knew its Latin name, Clelia clelia, which is a remarkably pretty name for a seriously mean-looking serpent that feeds on vipers. We wished it good hunting, and passed on.

The most spectacular feature of Costa Rica is a geological monster more than 5,000ft high that periodically rains death and destruction on anyone and everything in its vicinity. The last time the Arenal volcano blew its top on July 29, 1968, it wiped out two villages, killed 80 people and incinerated 45,000 head of cattle. Despite this mayhem, and continuing ominous rumblings and belching of ash and lava, it is a tourist attraction that has spawned resorts from which one can observe its fiery convulsions from a respectful distance.

One sedate vantage point is from a spa on the site of Tabacón, one of the villages destroyed in 1968. This is a great place for hedonists, a succession of rock pools fed by hot springs and landscaped with natural vegetation, with the volcano as a dramatic backdrop. The fact that the water might change to lava one day adds to the experience.

We never saw the throat of this monster, because it was cloaked in clouds, but we met a man nearby who owned a rainforest. He also owned a pleasant old hotel and a cattle ranch, but it was the 750 acres of primary forest on his land that was his pride and joy. "I don't feel I am the owner, how can anyone own a forest that has existed for thousands of years?" he said quite sensibly as we strolled towards it through a meadow. "I think of myself more as a custodian."

As we stepped through a gate in a wire fence around the protected area, strange things happened. The air was suddenly cooler and more moist, it was filled with subtle scents and sounds, and there was a sense of peace that was almost spiritual. The transformation from the hot, dry and relatively barren pasture beyond the fence was complete. It was as if we had stepped through an invisible door from one world into another, from one that was dead into one bursting with life.

That night we were in cloud cuckoo land. Like most good places, the Monteverde Cloud Forest requires a bit of effort to reach - in this case 20 miles of lurching and slewing on a dirt road that winds through green hills to a ridge overlooking a distant shimmer of the Pacific.

Monteverde's principal village, Santa Elena, has the three elements of any pueblo worthy of the name - a church, a school and a football ground - that cater for social gatherings in fairly equal measure. It is an agreeably ramshackle place in which wood and rusting iron are preferred to concrete, and there seem to be as many horses as four-wheel drives.

The Quakers live out of town, in homesteads made of lumber along country lanes that look like a film set for The Waltons. Wilford Quindon is one of the original settlers from Alabama, and he looks the part. Almost 70, he is a lean, wiry figure in denim dungarees who contemplates a largely untroubled life from a rocking-chair on his porch. A turkey is gobbling around the yard, a cat is sunning itself on a woodpile and humming birds are feeding on sweetened water by a window brightened by a row of glass bottles. You get the feeling the rocking-chair surveys a realm kings would envy.

There were about 40 Quakers who came at first, and now Wilford reckoned there were maybe 65. People come and go. He had eight children, and five of them had stayed to farm smallholdings in the area.

From the beginning they had been careful to preserve the forest above their land, and now the botanists and the tourists were coming, and this benefited the wider community.

"I'm content, I've been able to live according to my conscience," he says. "There is a sense of achievement."

Personally I consider rainforests to be the most magical places on Earth, and the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve is a star turn. It is deep and green and mysterious, and teeming with exuberant life that dazzles the senses. It extends across 10,000 acres, and in every square inch there is something growing and something dying. "Everything has a purpose, and everything is recycled," Alejandro observes. He explains that the leaves and mosses of cloud forests act as condensing surfaces, converting mist into drops of water that nourish the forest and form streams that provide local communities with fresh water. He has an expression for this perennial cycle. Ecological karma, he calls it.

The government shares his appreciation of wilderness areas, and has passed laws protecting more than a quarter of the country in one form or another. But pressures are mounting to cater for a boom in tourism, which surpassed bananas in 1993 as Costa Rica's main cash crop.

The debate is whether to continue with smallscale ecotourism, or to develop mega-resorts like Cancún in Mexico. The policy so far has been to carry on with the former and experiment cautiously with the latter. But even the Pacific coast, where hotels and apartment complexes have begun appearing, remains largely unspoilt.

The ethos of a country that prefers wildlife to warfare is summed up by a popular T-shirt bearing a declaration by a North American native chief in 1854. "Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we cannot eat money." Costa Rica has got the message. Pura vida.

Costa Rica basics

Getting there British Airways Holidays (0870 242 4245) has one-week tours of Costa Rica from £1,035 with scheduled flights from Gatwick and free connections from most regional UK airports; 14-night tours from £1,389. A good option is a one-week tour plus a week at a Pacific beach resort from £1,309.

For those who wish to devise their own itineraries, a local guide is advisable. Alejandro Castro is an excellent guide and companion for under £40 a day (negotiable); PO Box 179-2100 San José, Costa Rica (00 506 253 7619).

When to goThe dry season is generally from late December to April, and the rest of the year tends to be wet. In the Caribbean coastal region it rains all year round. Bear in mind that one of the most common features of rainforests is rain.

What to takeLight casual clothes and rainwear, a warmer layer for evenings; binoculars for the wildlife, insect repellent for the smaller species; and sturdy walking-shoes. US dollars are easier to exchange than sterling, and use of a Spanish phrase book will evoke a warm response.